At the turning of the New Age, after WWII and before the hippie era, Joseph Campbell authored The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a book chronicling many of the world’s mythic heroes and illustrating parallel truths between them. Myths, he asserted, often share a fundamental structure, that of “the hero’s journey.” For instance, a young knight might go out to fight a monster to protect a virgin princess and save the town. Or little hobbits, with the help of brave allies and mentors, might have to travel far and wide to fight the evil armies of Mordor and destroy the ring of power for the sake of all Middle Earth. Although I have not myself yet read through the book, I’ve listened to a fair number of Campbell’s recorded lectures, especially when they were free on Spotify—he is a delightfully eloquent and jovial speaker, by the way—and this is the gist of it. There is a sort of archetypal hero lurking in the shadows of most powerful stories, and it grips our attention, even if we’ve heard different versions of the same narrative structure over and over. It’s as if there is one big story that humans have been telling each other for all time.

Campbell emphasizes that this archetypal hero narrative spirals around the great mystery of life, namely that of how form comes into being. The hero delves into the supernatural chaos and reemerges with newfound wholeness. It is an outward journey as much as it is an inward one. The external conflict of the hero’s journey mirrors the internal conflict, such that the external and internal conflict can be understood as in-foldings of each other: involutions of the outer world’s responsibilities onto the self, evolutions of the self’s aspirations into the outer world. It’s not very hard to see how this can be interpreted as a map of human psychology. There are chaotic forces beneath our ordinary awareness, and they can hurt or help us, but if we do not venture into them, they will bring our downfall, so we must traverse into the unknown, the terra incognita, where all sorts of dark subterranean forces of unconciousness lurk, fight a monster, and return to ordinary consciousness with the treasure obtained through defeating the monster. Moreover, we can go a step further and say that consciousness as we know it is represented by the archetypal hero mythic structure. Beneath our awareness, prior to the symbolic forms of words and thoughts, are hidden demiurgic forces, forces that can be felt but are hard or impossible to comprehend. To have a quality of wholeness in our psyche, our consciousness must plunge into these subconscious waters and bridge the day with the night, so to speak. The division of our world into all sorts of conceptual pairs are but extensions of this foundational duality between mind and body, subject and object, spirit and form, matter and pattern, and the human spirit is restless for harmony to be reestablished between this original duality. When we watch movies or read books that depict such a hero’s journey, they hold our attention because we see in them a deep pattern we know in ourselves. The fact that a well-polished archetypal myth can compel billions to devote their lives to it for thousands of years is strong evidence that there is something pivotal in our psyche represented in the great religious myths. The bicameral mind hypothesis comes to mind. But for me, it’s more an issue of human thinking, language, toolmaking—essentially, the activities of the neocortex—evolutionarily outpacing the world around it, leading to all sorts of evils and the eventual dessicration of our home planet.

Our minds evolved to communicate with each other using discrete sounds that are associated with various objects, actions, meanings, etc., and this took place in tandem with the development of technology. Homo sapiens relies heavily on an object-oriented representational framework. When we recognize all the physical instances of something as a pattern and then condense this pattern to a sound, we run the risk of conflating the real, material instances of the pattern with our imagined version of the pattern. The word “tree” conveys the idea of a tree, and with it a bunch of kinds of trees, memories of trees you have seen, the ways trees work. There is a constellation of thoughts about trees that is conjured by the word “tree,” and this constellation happens to be like a little tree in your mind, with roots and branches, growth and decay, fruiting and tool-value. However, the “tree” in your mind is more intimate with you than the trees you experience outside. After all, the “tree” in your mind is yours, it’s made of the same stuff as your mind, whereas the physical trees out there are nature’s. The degree of separation between your mind and the outside world produces a leverage point that can be used for good or ill purposes. If you have a new way of seeing something, you can invent a new tool. Or if you have an expectation for how something should be, you can try to force reality to subsume into its idealized mental container. I surmise that the point of departure between human representation’s creativity and dogmatism is way back in our evolutionary geneology, in the split between chimpanzee and bonobo lifestyles. Chimps are warlike and patriarchal, whereas bonobos are feminist hippies. We humans have both lifestyles within us, and they are in tension. It is Cain and Abel.

How do you manage to keep an open-hearted, imaginative, peaceful attitude when the purposes of efficiency and success trend toward reductionism, patriarchy, war? We go to sleep and dream. We daydream. We play and explore. Something in the rhythm between play and work, day and night, art and science is essential. It brings us intune with existence. To deny or confuse the reality of either the inner tree or the outer tree is problematic. The inner tree, although imagined, is real. The outer tree, although mysterious, is also real. The self and the other are real in different ways. Although this is rather philosophical, this is the makings of a hero’s journey. It’s the relationship between chaos and order.

Chaos is often assumed to be evil. Chaos is taken to be antithetical to human purposes. After all, we were chased by monstrous beasts in a dangerous wilderness for millions upon millions of years. It is only until very recently in Earth’s history that humans have secured for themselves quite a few degrees of control over their environment, probably a novelty in evolutionary history. What happens when the ordering principles of society take so much control over the entire globe that we cut the limb we’re standing on? This is the ultimate crisis of postmodernity we’re finding ourselves in. We have relied upon the narrative of order prevailing over chaos for eons, and now it’s coming back to haunt us. Although the gypsies, mavericks, pariahs have been telling us for centuries to see both sides of order and chaos as part of a greater whole, overall the course of society has trended on the side of order over chaos. Now we must reimagine society, we must reinvent and rediscover how order and chaos interrelate.

Since ancient times, we have understood the integral relationship between order and chaos, between consciousness and unconsciousness, subject and object, etc. as comprising a larger whole, but we have tended to focus on the limelight of the hero vanquishing an enemey and have overlooked the subtleties surrounding the hero’s process. Let’s take a glance at a set of related myths that show the chaos-order dynamic. I’m being extremely selective in this, mostly because my amount of knowledge in comparative mythology is pretty small, but more importantly because I have identified an archetypal pattern. There are numerous myths in which a male sky/storm god fights a raging sea serpent.

The Egyptians have Horus vs. Set; the Babylonians: Marduk vs. Tiamat; the Greeks: Zeus vs. Typhon; the Philistines: Baal vs. Yaam; the Israelites: Yahweh vs. Leviathan; the Indians: Indra vs. Vrita; the Norse: Thor vs. Jorgunmandr. I’ve not yet delved into the details of each myth, their histories, their differences, etc., but I do want to note that the myth crosses linguistic families and cultures with ease. It is possible that the storm god vs. sea serpent myth reemerges from deep forces within the human psyche, an artifact of convergent evolution of stories corresponding with Campbell’s notion of an archetypal hero’s journey. Although that would be really cool—and I would be very curious to know if there are cultures that did in fact develop a storm god vs. sea serpent myth independently—I think it is more likely that the story was developed once and became wildly popular for many generations and spread across the trade routes of Eurasia. This does not detract from the story’s power, if only a little. In all these stories, the sea serpent plays the role of chaos, and the storm god plays the role of order. It is a strange thing to understand, as there are elements between the nemeses that crossover—a storm is a chaotic force, and the ocean is a unified entity. I haven’t quite figured it out yet. It might be a story about the underdog conquering the greater forces of nature: it seems, after all, that the atmosphere tends to act in response to the ocean, not the other way around. A storm can only stir up the surface of the sea, as any sailor knows an anchor dropped in deep water will provide stability and resilience. For the sky to prevail over the sea would be a momentous thing to witness. This doesn’t quite seem to strike a deep enough chord for me. Is it the difference between salt and fresh water? Saltwater cannot be drunk, but freshwater brings life to the land. Is it the relationship between lightning and thoughts? The clouds relate to the mind, the ocean relates to the body? I think so, but there is still a lot to discover here.

Before I wrap up this blog post, I want to say that when I was wanting to move out to Big Sur, in those early days of longing, the story of the storm and the sea, order vs. chaos was stirring in me. I felt there was a great mythic poetic something to be set in Big Sur. In Big Sur, we see the xenith of human aspiration—California wealth and tourism—juxtaposed dramatically against rugged and lush wilderness. I daresay that nowhere else on Earth is the juxtaposition so clearly evident, inspiring the likes of Joseph Campbell and his student Alan Watts at the Esalen Institute, not to mention countless hippy-type wanderer-bohemians personified by people like Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass Elliot, Judy Collins, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac to challenge the quest of modernity for order to prevail over chaos and explore alternatives. I fell into that vein when I worked on my thesis, “Cultivating Creativity in Aerospace Systems Engineering to Manage Complexity,” and when I finally graduated, I moved on to the next layer of the onion, and Big Sur took me into its fold. It feels as if I’ve been meaning to come here since before I can remember. It’s not merely me that’s stirring with the myth, it’s in the place. Soon enough, we will discuss the striking similarity between Cone Peak in Big Sur and Mount Killic in Turkey/Syria, the setting for quite a few of these storm vs. sea myths.



Friday, May 19, 2023
Gorda, California